So there it is, finally, in plain sight for all to see. The collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia is no longer merely centered around secret meetings with vague agendas, happenstance too remarkable to have been coincidence, and a thousand poorly understood connections. Now we have something entirely different, and it changes everything: a confession that the Trump campaign truly was trying to coordinate with Russia on the deep, dark, gritty kind of stuff that election rigging is made of.

The head of Cambridge Analytica, the voter data analysis firm that everyone from Jared Kushner on down has publicly credited for Donald Trump’s bizarre election victory, has been caught confessing that he tried to work with WikiLeaks to steal Hillary Clinton’s emails. Don’t let the imaginary half-degree of separation fool you here: Cambridge Analytica was the Donald Trump campaign. Trump is now claiming that the company only played a minor role in his campaign, so he can paint it as having acted on its own. Bullshit. This is everything.

It’s why Trump and his allies are now putting down their few remaining chips on the hilariously phony scandal about President Obama and Hillary Clinton and Russia and Uranium. It’s a joke of a fake story, but it’s the only desperate card they have left to play. It’s why most of the Republicans in Congress, even the ones like Chuck Grassley who had been willing to go along with the Trump-Russia investigation, are now suddenly trying to sabotage that investigation from within. The GOP didn’t want to have to get its hands dirty like this, but it’s now desperate to create the kind of distraction that might prop up Trump just long enough so it can get its tax bill rammed through.

What we’re seeing now is pure panic from anyone who still cares about Donald Trump, or still needs him a bit longer. Even if it’ll take a moment for the public to figure out that the Cambridge Analytica confession is the bombshell of the Trump-Russia scandal to date, Trump’s own side has immediately grasped that this is the bottomless pit from which there is no emerging.

We now have proof that the voter data analysis arm of the Donald Trump campaign was actively seeking to collude with Russian-controlled hacker thugs and criminals. It’s just a matter of time before we see proof that these efforts did lead to collusion, and that Trump and Russia did conspire to rig the election. The dam has broken. There’s no going back. It’s why we’re suddenly seeing borderline pandemonium. It’s about to get even more crazy.